The 30th of January 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party,
is appointed chancellor of Germany and aims to lead the German “master
race” to victory in the "racial struggle" against those deemed as “inferior” peoples,
especially the Jews. The Nazi regime quickly begins to restrict the civil and human rights
of the Jewish people and gradually excludes them from professions, businesses, and public spaces.
After the outbreak of the Second World War, German policies vary from country to country,
including direct, brutal occupation and reliance upon collaborating regimes.
After fall of France in May 1940, as part of the armistice agreement France signed
with Germany on the following month, the country is divided into occupied and unoccupied zones.
When in November 1942 German forces take over the unoccupied part of Vichy France,
a man is sent to Lyon, its resistance capital at the time,
whose role is to dismantle the Resistance and rid the city of Jews. His name is Klaus Barbie.
Nikolaus "Klaus" Barbie was born on 25 October 1913 in Godesberg then part of the German Empire.
His parents Nikolaus Barbie and Anna Hees, both teachers, married one year after Klaus was born.
The First World War began on the 28th of July 1914.
The same year, Barbie’s father was conscripted into German Army but was wounded in the neck
at Verdun and captured by the French whom he hated for the rest of his life.
He never recovered his health and became an alcoholic who abused his children. Until 1923,
when he was 10, Klaus Barbie attended the local school where his father taught. He then
attended a boarding school in Trier, and was relieved to be away from his abusive father.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933. In June of the same year,
Barbie's younger brother Kurt died, at the age of 18. Because Barbie’s father Nikolaus
also died later that year, young Klaus could not finance his university studies.
While unemployed, Barbie was conscripted into the Reich labour service which was
a major organization established in Nazi Germany as an agency to help mitigate the
effects of unemployment on the German economy, militarise the workforce and indoctrinate it with
Nazi ideology. It was the official state labour service, divided into separate sections for men
and women who had to work up to 76 hours a week. The organization would also provide funding for
education or training for poor members so they could learn a trade or get a University degree.
The experience in the Reich labour service
turned Barbie into an unshakeable supporter of the "Third Reich".
In September 1935, Barbie joined the SS and began working in its subgroup - the
SD – which was the intelligence service of the SS responsible for gathering intelligence about the
Nazi Party’s enemies, real and perceived. These supposed enemies included political opponents,
Jews, and freemasons, among others. The SD became one of the Nazi regime’s key
sources of information and knowledge about Jews. Over the course of the Nazi era,
the SD took on an increasingly prominent role in Nazi anti-Jewish policies and for most of
its existence, the SD was run by and closely associated with Reinhard Heydrich, an important
Nazi figure in the history of the Holocaust. In his initial post Barbie was trained as an
interrogator, a role to which he would return later in his career to terrifying effect.
In May 1937, Barbie joined the Nazi Party and 2 years later in April 1939,
he became engaged to the daughter of a postal clerk with whom he had two children.
The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded
Poland. The campaign in Poland ended on the 6th of October the same year with
Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of the country.
The German invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands started
on the 10th of May 1940 and became known as the Battle of France. These countries,
along with France, were conquered within 6 weeks. Immediately after the German conquest and
occupation of the Netherlands, Barbie arrived in Amsterdam on May 29, 1940 and until March 1942
he was employed there in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Barbie and his subordinates
were responsible for the persecution of resistance fighters and Jews, especially those who had moved
from Germany before the start of the war. Barbie was also instrumental in the persecution and
torture of Freemasons in the Netherlands and personally directed attacks on lodges.
On 11 October 1940, Barbie arrested Hermannus van Tongeren, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of the
Netherlands which was a Masonic Grand Lodge in the Netherlands. In March 1941, van Tongeren was
transported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where, in freezing conditions, he died two weeks
later. On 1 April, Barbie summoned Van Tongeren's daughter, Charlotte, to the SD headquarters and
informed her that her father had died of an infection in both ears and had been cremated.
On one occasion, when Barbie received orders to arrest two German-Jewish ice-cream peddlers, he
decided that a mere arrest would not be sufficient punishment. Instead of arresting the two men,
he decided to murder them on the spot killing one man by bludgeoning him to death with an ashtray
and the other one by shooting him. For his zeal, he was awarded the Iron Cross by his superiors.
On a separate occasion, Barbie was given credit for rounding up and dispatching
over 200 “Zionists” when he tricked the local Jewish Council into giving him the locations of
hundreds of Jews who were hiding in Amsterdam. When during the disturbances in Amsterdam in
February 1941, Barbie had acid thrown into his face by the Jewish shop owners, in reprisal over
four hundred young Jewish men were arrested and sent to Mauthausen, where most of them perished.
In 1942 when the Gestapo needed to pick a man to head their office in Lyon,
the “Capital of the French Resistance,” Klaus Barbie with his cunning,
language skills, and special zeal was a natural choice.
As the local Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie earned the nickname “the Butcher of Lyon”
for his brutal actions towards Jews and members of the French Resistance.
He personally interrogated and tortured his victims from his
headquarters in the notorious Hotel Terminus.
Barbie was also a sexual deviant who raped the women that he interrogated.
Erna Paris in her account of Barbie’s interrogation wrote:
“Women were always tortured naked, to the deep enjoyment of the torturers. Barbie kept two
German shepherd dogs. One was trained to lunge and bite. The other was trained to mount naked women.”
After the war, Mario Blardone, who survived Barbie’s interrogation,
described how he had seen Barbie try to have a young girl raped by his dog.
Barbie’s most famous victim was the hero of the French resistance, Jean Moulin,
whom Barbie personally interrogated on a daily basis for three weeks. Moulin
was mercilessly tortured by Barbie and his men; hot needles where shoved under his fingernails,
his fingers were forced through the narrow space between the hinges of a door and a wall and then
the door was repeatedly slammed until the knuckles broke. Screw-levered handcuffs were placed on
Moulin and tightened until they bit through his flesh and broke through the bones of his wrists.
He would not talk. He was whipped and beaten until his face was an unrecognizable pulp.
Moulin refused to divulge any intelligence to his captors.
Moulin died from the effects of his torture near Metz on July 8, 1943,
on his way to captivity in Germany. On behalf of his cruel crimes and specially
for the Moulin case, Barbie was awarded, by Hitler himself, the “First Class Iron Cross with Swords.”
He also tortured the children. Simone Lagrange, a soft-spoken Holocaust survivor whose family
was exterminated, later recalled the arrest of her father, mother and herself on June 6, 1944.
Denounced by a French neighbor as Jews, Simone and her parents were taken to Gestapo
headquarters where Barbie, dressed in gray and caressing a kitten, said Simone was pretty.
“He was caressing the cat. And me, a kid 13 years old, I could not imagine that he
could be evil because he loved animals. I was tortured by him for eight days.”
During the following week, Barbie hauled Simone out of a prison cell each day, yanking her by her
hair, and beating and punching at her open wounds in an effort to obtain information.
Another survivor, Lise Lesevre, recalled how Klaus Barbie tortured her for nine days in 1944,
beating her, and nearly drowning her in a bathtub. She told how she was hung up
by hand cuffs with spikes inside them and beaten with a rubber bar. She was ordered to strip naked
and get into a tub filled with freezing water. Her legs were tied to a bar across the tub and
Barbie yanked a chain attached to the bar to pull her underwater. During her last interrogation,
Barbie ordered her to lie flat on a chair and struck her on the back with a spiked ball
attached to a chain. It broke a vertebrae, and she suffered for the rest of her life.
Another survivor, Ennat Leger, said: “Klaus Barbie had the eyes of a monster. He was a savage. My
God, he was a savage! It was unimaginable. He broke my teeth, he pulled my hair back.
He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until my lips split from the pressure.”
One of Barbie’s most infamous crimes was the deportation of youngsters from a children’s
home in Izieu in southern France. Their would-be rescuers, Sabine and Miron Zlatin, had hidden the
children in a remote farm house in the Rhone Valley. The children, most of them immigrants,
ranged in age from 4 to 17. Their Jewish identities were a closely guarded secret,
and in official records the young persons were identified only as refugees. On the morning of
April 6, 1944, Barbie led a raid on the children’s colony, capturing 44 children
and seven adult caretakers. A witness of the raid later recalled: It was breakfast time.
The children were in the refectory drinking hot chocolate. I was on my way down the stairs
when I saw three trucks in the drive. My sister shouted to me: it’s the Germans, save yourself!
I jumped out the window. I hid myself in a bush in the garden...I heard the cries of the
children that were being kidnapped and I heard the shouts of the Nazis who were carrying them
away...They threw the children into the trucks like they were sacks of potatoes.
Most of them were crying, terrorized”. Fearing that local authorities might intervene,
Barbie arranged for their immediate transfer to the Drancy transit camp. Miron Zlatin and two
of the oldest youngsters were ultimately sent to Tallinn, Estonia, where they were shot to death.
The rest of the children were deported to Auschwitz, where they were gassed immediately.
One Auschwitz survivor later testified what happened to the children: ”I asked myself
where were the children who arrived with us? In the camp there wasn’t a single child to be
seen. Then those who had been there for a while informed us of the reality. “You see that chimney,
the one smoke never stops coming out of. . . you smell that odor of burned flesh. . . ?”
In all, it is believed that Barbie was responsible for the execution or murder of over
4,000 individuals and for the deportation of 7,500 Jews, most of whom perished in Auschwitz.
Barbie left Lyon in August 1944, just a month before the US Army liberated the city. He
made his way back into Germany, where he joined the fighting until the war ended.
After the war, the French government filed charges against Barbie and his name was published on lists
of wanted war criminals. Although Barbie was arrested at least twice, he was not identified.
In 1946, Barbie was living under an assumed name in Marburg, Germany,
and worked with an organized group of Nazis to form a new German government. In 1947, a US
Army Counter-Intelligence Corps – CIC - officer located Barbie, but instead of arresting him,
the officer recruited the wanted war criminal as an informant. Between 1947 and 1951,
Barbie supplied the American officials with information about French intelligence and
Soviet and anti-communist activities in the US zone of occupied Germany.
By the time the French government requested extradition of Barbie from American officials
in 1949, it was public knowledge that Barbie was living freely in the American
zone under a false identity. As the French demands for extradition escalated, in 1951,
the CIC, fearing that Barbie knew too much about its intelligence operations,
helped Barbie to escape to South America with his family via the American “Rat Line”
that smuggled escaped Nazis and other Axis fugitives out of postwar Europe.
Under the name Klaus Altmann, Barbie settled his family in La Paz, Bolivia. While the
French government tried Barbie in absentia, sentencing him to death, Barbie established
himself as a prominent business figure in La Paz. With strong connections to the Bolivian
ruling party, Barbie was involved not only in the shipping trade, but also in arms dealing.
Over the next twenty years, he received Bolivian citizenship and a diplomatic
passport that allowed him to travel to Europe and the United States unimpeded.
However, in 1971, “Nazi hunters” Serge and Beate Klarsfeld identified Altmann as Barbie,
and located him, then living in Peru. In 1972, the Klarsfelds launched a public
campaign to have Barbie brought back to France to stand trial for war crimes.
Barbie returned to Bolivia, where his connections with the Bolivian military
provided protection from extradition until the regime fell in the 1980 Bolivian Cocaine
Coup. Under a new government, Barbie was arrested in 1983 and returned to France.
Back in Lyon, Barbie was charged with war crimes for the deportation of the children of Izieu,
the August 1944 deportations to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, and other crimes. Controversially,
Barbie did not face charges related to the arrest and torture of Jean Moulin.
Among those who testified again Barbie were 80-year-old Sabine Zlatin,
founder of the children’s home in Izieu, and her fellow caretaker Lea Feldblum,
who was 69 years old and the sole survivor of those deported from the home.
Barbie’s trial was a major public event, prompting serious conversations in France about the war,
the French Resistance, and the Holocaust. During his trial, Barbie said,
"When I stand before the throne of God, I shall be judged innocent.”
When the trial concluded in 1987, Barbie was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Despite his conviction, Barbie remained an unrepentant and devoted Nazi, stating:
“I am proud to have been a commanding officer of the best military outfit in the Third Reich,
and if I had to be born a thousand times again, I would be a thousand times what I’ve been.”
Klaus Barbie was 77 years old when he died of cancer in French custody in 1991.
There were no tears shed for Klaus Barbie.
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